Fair Use Week 2015

February 23-27

Harvard is once again celebrating Fair Use Week, which marks "the important role fair use plays in achieving the Constitutional purpose of intellectual property rights in the US: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts."

This event, which was inaugurated in 2014 at Harvard by Kyle Courtney, the Office for Scholarly Communication's (OSC's) Program Manager and Copyright Advisor, is now sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and is being celebrated nationally.

Fair Use in Practice at the Dudley House Common Room, 10:00-11:30: Panelists, Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager for MIT's Office of Scholarly Publishing, Copyright & Licensing; Peter Hirtle, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Senior Policy Advisor to the Cornell University Library; and Andy Sellars, Berkman Center's Corydon B. Dunham First Amendment Fellow

Guest blog post by Matthew Rimmer, Australian Research Council Future Fellow

February 23

Events

Emphasizing the transformative nature of their pedagogical work, fair use expert and advocate Kyle Courtney held an open discussion Monday with a large group of editors and project mangers at HarvardX. Questions abounded as the topics of third-party material use and copyright were discussed in connection with current debates around content use in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The lively discussion ended with an appreciation for education around fair use and copyright as the need for a more universal understanding of these topics increases across the university.

February 24

Events

On Tuesday of Fair Use Week, Kyle visited the Harvard Library's Imaging Services Department to discuss fair use, the Copyright First Responders, and orphan works. The conversation ranged from the "slavish reproduction" of two-dimensional works to the forthcoming policy that will help bring clarity to the copyright assessments that Imaging Services makes on a daily basis.

February 25

Events

Day three of Fair Use Week brought Kyle to Harvard Law School, where he led a discussion on the School's case study, What's fair about fair use? The battle over e-reserves at GSU. Participants were challenged to both put themselves in Georgia State's shoes - to settle or fight the suit in court - and those of the publishers. From the history of university press publishing to the development of the classroom guidelines, the discussion was wide-ranging. To wrap up, Courtney challenged the group to settle on a compromise that would satisfy both parties, with interesting results.

February 26

Events

Thursday opened with our headline event consisting of a panel of experts presenting their thoughts on the latest news, as well as debating current issues, "the good, bad and the ugly," in copyright and fair use. This year's panel included Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright, and Licensing at MIT, Peter Hirtle, Research Fellow at the Berkman Center and Senior Policy Advisor to the Cornell University Library, and Andy Sellars, who works at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic and is the Berkman Center's Corydon B. Dunham First Amendment Fellow. A lively Q&A allowed each panelist to respond to concerns presented by the audience around the issues at hand.

The second event on Thursday of Fair Use Week invited the Harvard Library community to learn about the Copyright First Responder program and their experiences, both with fair use and beyond. The participating CFRs shared stories from the trenches: Emily Bell spoke to the misconceptions of fair use around campus; Carol Kentner outlined her role as a "portfolio manager" for helping faculty gather course content; Scott Lapinski spoke to focusing his time on answering student questions about copyright and fair use in ETDs and contracts; last, Carli Spina mentioned her work with HarvardX, emphasizing the public domain and open access alternatives on which HarvardX relies. The audience enjoyed fair use fortune cookies and posed questions ranging from the limits of licensed materials and the OGC's involvement in the CFR program.

February 27

Events

As a special close to the week's activities, Kyle Courtney released "The origin of U.S. fair use," an artistic rendering of the codification of fair use into the Copyright Act of 1976. The exemption's creation was intimately woven into the history of Harvard, which readers may explore here.

Thank you for your support of Fair Use Week at Harvard! We encourage you to follow our copyright blog, and Fair Use Week Tumblr and Twitter feeds for news and event information about Fair Use Week 2016.